User blog:Semerone/Technical updates - Wiki backend

Hello, dear fellow admins.

This update is related to my latest visit at an exhibition fair.

Actually, right now, I am writing this blog while still being at the exhibition fair and using their free wireless LAN.

The topics for this blog will be more of a technical nature, making this blog pointless for visitors, but very important to any admins of our wiki, that are working on the backend. (including myself)

Today's topics will be two ideas that came to me while I was watching presentations at the exhibition fair. At the exhibition fair, Vasara and myself could be met and talked to, representing Kishin Douji Zenki Wikia's technological standpoint and always future oriented, open minded community.

From Forums to Mixed talks


This one is related to a topic, that Vasara spoke about at the exhibition fair.

It is related to our "Mixted talk" threads, which we use to actively communicate with each other about hot topics, including content, that needs to be work, as well as entirely new content.

In the past, we used the Forums for such things. In fact, we still have the classic Forum, which isn't available to newer wikis.

Due to us being uncertain, if Wikia/FANDOM is going to let older wikis keep the Forums forever or, if they will vanish at some point, we migrated that content to the "old posts" found in The alternate Forum, which was created and is being maintained by Gokimaru.

As the blogs used in it don't directly inform users when someone posts a new entry, this is suboptimal for dragged out conversations, so we moved these to our message walls.

This isn't exactly optimal either, as these message wall threads tend to get very long and are continued by follow up threads.

Thread categorization - An issue or a possibility?
Despite this, they become hard to follow, as they can't be categorized. At least, they can't be categorized by putting them into categories like it can be done with aritcles, images, videos or blogs.

Message wall threads use a special system, which was once also used for the Forum threads. Talk threads can be "categorized" by attaching them to an article!

At the time when we first tested this, though, it seemed to make a quite a mess and caused articles to end up looking unprofessional, scaring away visitors and being in general disliked by the active community.

Semi-Automated categorization


Now, I had a new idea, though.

The idea, I am going to present here are Semi-Automated "Mixed talk"-lists!

Instead of linking a "Mixed talk" thread (or any other thread, that should be "categorized" for that matter) to an active article like, the Kazue Hayami article, for example, and making it look unprofessional, I thought, that we should make special "Autolist articles".

These "Autolist articles" would obviously still be recognized as wiki pages by the wiki, as they wouldn't exist in a separate namespace. (this is also an issue with fan fictions, but it can't be resolved, as only the staff can change these things and likely won't do so any time in the future - but this can be neglected, as it has no impact on the work on our wiki)

Nonetheless, "Autolist articles" would allow us to create very simple and short subpages, which would only contain two or three sentences.

Autolist articles
"Now, you might say: "Hey, Semerone! By Kishin Douji Zenki Wikia's standards, these should be a case of...

And you would be right, if it was a normal article, I was talking about.

Of cause, these aren't normal articles.

The purpose of the "Autolist articles" would be very similar to the existing category system.

I told you, that it's normally not possible to cateogrize threads, but with these "Autolist articles", we could provide a workaround and allow our wiki to get more organized.

Also, creating them would be very easy for us admins (even a normal user without special rights could create them!) and all we would have to do would be going through the talk threads and adding a single referece to the respective "Autolist article" to each of them!

As such, we could quickly categorize these rouge threads and greatly improve the maintenance capabilities and information availability on our wiki at the same time!"

The future of Kishin Douji Zenki Wikia


When I was thinking about the first topic, a second one followed soon.

I got to the point, where I realized, that "Autolist articles" will be especially important for Kishin Douji Zenki Wikia's multilingual future and its subsidiary wikis. (see Zenki's "New Wikis blog" and any related blogs for more information)

If we don't implement this feature before making or next step at creating and building the new German and Japanese communities for our wiki, we will lose track of important conversions or might even end up opening multiple threads regarding the same topic without noticing and getting stuck on the spot or running into issues of things being not discussed properly and an admin (might be any admin, including myself) being either clueless or rushing forth and then ending up in an edit conflict with another admin.

The results would be disastrous.



As such, we need to make sure we not only finish implementing our "Autolist articles" before properly stating the work on our new subsidiary wikis, we also need to make sure to keep our topics synchronized, so no one is left out or decides something, that would screw up the harmony of the three wikis' content. (for example, one subsidiary wiki featuring the translation of an older version of an aritcle, while the other one already has the new version and us forgetting to update the other one as well)



You see, this latest update blog concerns a very important, but easy to do, but also very necessary change, that we need to go through, if we want to proceed as planned.

I know, that you probably won't like the strict time limit, (I have to admit, I hate time limits, too!) but we need to make sure, that, like Zenki likes to say, "everything is fine and snazzy", before we make our next move.

Thank you very much for reading.

''Greetings Semerone (Founder of Kishin Douji Zenki Wikia)''

Note: I might not be able to answer you for the next few hours, as Vasara and myself will be on our way home and I will be driving. Despite this, I will respond as soon as possible, if there are any questions left.